David Green was only eight years old when he came home from school one fateful afternoon in 1982, and in a move that would change his life forever, he innocently turned on the television. It was then that it happened -he became passionate about Dr Who, the cult sci-fi series which returned to television last night, 16 years after it was originally axed in 1989. "From the first episode I ever saw, I was addicted to it," David, of Downer, says. He is a self-confessed Dr Who nut and a member of the newly-formed Canberra Dr Who Fan Club, which gets together on weekends to watch old Dr Who episodes. David grew up to become a music student and a pianist, but his passion for the long-running show, that spooky "ooo, wee, ooo" theme music, and the doctor with the long scarf and the police-box time machine, never died. " ... I watched it, and I was hooked. It was so imaginative and frightening. It was incredibly scary for me at that time." For the record, the first episode he watched was a repeat of Spearhead From Space, and was about a group of shop mannequins coming to life and killing people. The mannequins made a comeback in last night's new episode. David has collected 50 Dr Who DVDs, read all the spin-off novels, written two published Dr Who stories, and was the resident expert on the show at a recent sci-fi convention in Canberra. "I'm full of endless knowledge, I could talk about Dr Who forever." He wasn't the only child to become hooked on the show during the 26 years the original series was aired on television, from 1963 until its axing in 1989, due to falling popularity. Millions of fans around the world have been eagerly awaiting the doctor's latest battles with aliens, Aztecs and those infamous Daleks. "Dr Who is a hero, and the world needs heroes. He travels to any point in time and to anywhere in the universe, meeting alien beings and saving the universe from evil. There is endless scope for adventure." Dr Who first hit British television screens in 1963. The BBC commissioned the show because it needed a family TV show to slot between Saturday afternoon sports and Saturday night music shows. The key elements would be a time/ space machine in the shape of a police box and a mysterious character known only as 'The Doctor' -a 650-year-old man from another planet who would operate the machine with the help of a pretty assistant. A police box, by the way, is a public phone with a direct line to the nearest cop shop. Dr Who's police box is one of a kind as it is much bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside. Filmed in black and white, the series first aired on November 23, with the doctor, William Hartnell, travelling back 100,000 years in time to help cavemen discover fire. A production note about the series said it would be "neither fantasy nor space travel nor science fiction." At the end of the third series in 1966, due to poor health and a changing production team, Hartnell decided to call it quits, leaving the writers in a bit of a pickle. To get around the problem, they came up with an integral part of what David calls "the Dr Who legend" -the doctor's ability to regenerate into a new body whenever he dies or is injured. In 1983, during a TV movie which re-united five of the doctors, the writers limited the doctor's ability to regenerate -he only had 13 lives, meaning he could rejuvenate only 12 times.

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